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Move over, Margot’s Barbie pink – Zendaya’s taken her movie’s tennis theme and run with it, says Laura Antonia Jordan
1 IT’S A GLAM SLAM. From the very first serve – and serve she always does – of the Challengers press tour, it’s been clear: Zendaya is on straight-sets-victory form, each look an unmissable homage to the film – a spiky, spicy tale of love and rivalry set in the world of tennis. From the Loewe dress hand-embellished with 150,000 crystals and emblazoned with a player on the front, which kicked things off in Sydney, to the sequin Thom Browne drop-waist gown with athletic mesh inserts and racket motif embroidery in London – via heels that seem to skewer tennis balls (Loewe, again) and a Lacoste tennis net-inspired skirt that took 800 hours to embroider and a ton of excellent vintage – she’s playing at the top of her style game.
Surprised? Not at all. Zendaya reliably brings capital F fashion to any red carpet she pitches up on and is a natural choice to co-chair this year’s Met Gala. There is a seemingly unlimited energy to how she dresses, itself an off-screen evolution of a role, the creation of a world around it.
This, however, is a film tour that deserves nothing less than the best clothes in the biz. Directed by supremely stylish Call Me By Your Name and Bones And All auteur Luca Guadagnino (who has form collaborating with designers: Raf Simons lent his talents to A Bigger Splash and I Am Love), Loewe’s Jonathan Anderson has created the costumes for Challengers – his hand is also all over the press tour, including on co-stars Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist.
Working with her long-term stylist Law Roach, Zendaya’s joyful, all-in tourdrobe plays to the theme while maintaining super-high fashion credentials. The look? Tennis (duh!) – on court and off; SW19 via Vegas residency. On = pleated miniskirts, whites, Lacoste, big player pants. Off = the moneyed world of the preppy tennis club, via prim jackets, sleek tailoring and the like. If the sight of Zendaya in a bedazzled Loewe tennis dress doesn’t convince the All England Club to update its dress code, nothing will. Proof of her commitment to the look, she dyed her hair blonde ; ‘a little reset’, she told US Vogue ahead of the Sydney premiere, to mark a shift from the futuristic, dystopian fierceness of Dune: Part Two duties. Indeed, she has been so fabulously, thematically, immersively attired that it made 2023’s Barbie pink press blast look like an enthusiastic warm-up act.
Zendaya and Roach’s is a partnership more than a decade old – and it shows. He gets his girl. He prefers to go by the title ‘image architect’, which he des
